Cloning News Raises Words Of Caution

Spare human parts. Genetic reincarnation. A league of Michael Jordans. A horde of Hitlers.

Now that a sheep has been cloned in Scotland, all those sci-fi wonders and horrors seem just a little more likely. What is not certain is whether humans are wise enough to make the right choices.

Scientists, religious experts and bioethicists are expressing reactions from caution to outright fear at the prospect of creating an exact copy of a human being from a few cells.

At first, it will be for a few very good and very special reasons, some say. But as time passes, the strange will become the familiar, just as the once-shocking picture of a sperm and an egg coming together in a petri dish has become today's commonplace in vitro fertilization.

"Technology often takes on a life of its own," said Ben Mulvey, assistant professor of philosophy at Nova Southeastern University. "We often ask if we can do something before we ask why, or what if."

The announcement of the recent Scottish achievement apparently took thinkers by surprise. Cloning wasn't on the agenda when the Florida Bioethics Network, of which Mulvey is a member, held its annual conference last fall in Fort Lauderdale. Nor was it discussed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops at a bioethics workshop last fall.

Nor does the American College of Medical Genetics, gathering today in Fort Lauderdale, have cloning on its schedule, which was set long before the announcement out of Scotland. But it's a sure bet that participants will discuss it informally.

The Vatican, however, recovered on Wednesday, calling for a worldwide ban on human cloning. "A person has the right to be born in a human way and not in the laboratory," said moral theologian Gino Concetti, who is close to Pope John Paul II.

Even with animals, the research should be aimed at benefiting the creatures themselves as well as humanity, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia said. The priest is director of the institute of bioethics at the Catholic University in Rome.

Cloning of fetal animals, such as pigs and cows, was perfected by the late 1970s, said bioethicist Mary Jo Iozzio of Barry University in Miami Shores. By 1995, a doctor at George Washington University was cloning human embryos.

Public uproar led to closing of the GWU program, and no one has reported human experiments elsewhere, Iozzio said. "But it's a given that if someone is doing it somewhere, it's happening everywhere."

Some religious leaders, like Rabbi Edward Maline of Temple Emanu-El in Lauderdale Lakes, recoil at the idea. "People are not like minted coins that all look alike. The Creator made every human different. That's obviously the way it was meant to be. Cloning would be against the creative process."

Most other observers don't write off the process that quickly. But they do raise the questions: What's the point? Who will benefit? What principles will steer the cloning of humans?

One reason might be to breed a brother or sister for a child who needs a transplant, of blood or bone marrow or other tissue. Using old-fashioned reproductive methods, some couples have already done this. With cloning, the second child, like an identical twin, would be a perfect genetic match for the first, much improving the chance for the operation's success.

But what of a spare arm or leg? Or kidney? Or heart? What would the clone think? Would he or she have the right to refuse?

And what happens if there are mistakes in the process?

"To do this [cloning sheep), they killed 300 embryos and made deformed sheep," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "That would make doing anything in humans beyond unethical - it would be criminal."

There are those who want to clone themselves - perhaps to gain new bodies, or inherit their own estates. It's a clear wish for immortality.

"The very person who says I want a lot of me's out there is the very person you wouldn't want to be cloned," said the Rev. Richard McCormick, a Jesuit theologian at the University of Notre Dame. Some people might enjoy having a twin - or triplets or quads - to work their job and attend social functions. That was the theme of the 1996 movie Multiplicity, which had several Michael Keatons exploring the complexities of such an arrangement.

"It would be another way of escaping responsibility," Iozzio said. "Few of us would approve of that. And what would it do to the rest of us who can't clone ourselves?''

Even without plumbing the metaphysical depths of what or where souls are, many people think that cloning could never re-create a person. Even twins are different people, though genetically alike.